Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"A brilliant, innovative study of camp that exceeds the terms in which this topic traditionally has been conceived. The result is a reformulation of camp as queer industrial labor, from the perspective of the production as well as the reception of that work. Anyone working on camp will hereafter have to reckon with this book."--Steven Cohan, author of "Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Working Like a Homosexual

Duke University Press

Chapter One

Vincente [Minnelli] was not a man who was a dictator. He tried to do it in a soft and niceway. Heworked in let's say ... I don't know whether you will understand what I say ... he worked like a homosexual. I don't mean that nastily. I have nothing against homosexuals ... -Lela Simone, production assistant at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Nowhere is the challenge to locate the positive image of same-sex desire in film representation so pronounced as it is in relation to the classical Hollywood cinema. Since Vito Russo's groundbreaking 1977 volume on the subject of gay and lesbian imagery in film in The Celluloid Closet, scholars and historians of modernist sexualities have found their task grounded in the opposition between (apparently nonexistent) "positive" Hollywood representations of queer men and women and all too plentiful stereotypical vilifications of male and female same-sex eroticisms. Critical treatments of the relations of queer sexualities to the production of cinema have thus largely taken two approaches. The first stresses the pathologizing effect of Hollywood cinema in its portrayal of queers, with Rope and Caged, for example, offering to those in pursuit of queer-positive images particularly objectionable depictions of queer life. From this perspective, the presence of queers in Hollywood studios seems a remote possibility. The second approach, then, embraces queer filmmakers outside Hollywood, independent from Hollywood both in terms of the economic conditions under which they make movies and in terms of the array of film styles available for contemplating the role of gender and sexuality in contemporary life. The exceptions to these two approaches are notable, particularly in terms of how Hollywood can be understood as a site of production for queer filmmakers: for example, Dorothy Arzner has rightfully taken her place as a figure of an anti-auteur auteur, and George Cukor and James Whale have only recently begun to be rethought as queer directors. In the wake of the assessment that Hollywood has traditionally been hostile to queer laborers (at least at the level that their cinematic visions might reach the big screen) and that therefore it is only outside corporate studio production that queers might make movies, we are left with a historical and theoretical vacuum when we consider that queer men and women have been instrumental in the productions of some kinds of Hollywood film that are not entirely homophobic.

This chapter rethinks the situation by fixing its attention on the films made by Vincente Minnelli in the Freed unit of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the late 1940s and attempting to dislodge these films from universalizing accounts of classical Hollywood cinema. My interest is in accounting for the contributions of queermen, and the specific example of Vincente Minnelli, to the Freed unit, and in rethinking the status of their labor as crucial to the films' hallmark style. Although I will consider Minnelli at the greatest length in terms of camp and queer-inflected production, there are numerous opportunities to discuss queer figures in the Freed unit, the most important being Cole Porter and Roger Edens. Porter composed many of the most popular songs to be performed in Freed musicals; Edens was responsible for the unit's daily operations, and his vocal arrangements are immensely important in the history of the American film musical and the popular song. In this respect, this chapter forms an attempt to render more visible the labor of queers and their sensibilities within the production of a dominant cinema, sensibilities that I discuss in terms of camp. Further, the "queer labor" of camp is a strategic category for understanding the camp markings affected by the production of these films, and therefore queer labor, in the form of camp encodings, functioned for the studio as a way of enhancing the final product by way of "product differentiation." At stake are both a recuperative account of the contributions of men whose difference vis-a-vis sex/gender are largely ignored because of the imperatives of the closet and, equally important, the challenge to our impulses to ignore differences, whether they arise in terms of race, ethnicity, class, or gender, as such differences informed the ideological practices and the material production of Hollywood film in its larger social dimensions.

By treating the question of narrative integration in the musicals of the Freed unit, I demonstrate that the stylistic anomalies of the Freed films that are most pronounced indicate an extra-added labor on those texts. Keeping in mind both how camp has previously been understood as a fascination with artifice, excess, and performance and how a history of queer Hollywood lives continues to circulate anecdotally, I claim here that these features of some Freed productions (which occur most often for this account in regard to the art direction) provide an opportunity to understand camp as a kind of queer labor, but queer in that the erotic dimensions of queer male Freed laborers' lives were masked by camp, and labor in that the conditions for their productive output were predicated on the particular economic practices of the studio in the period that I am describing. Thus I am attempting to bring together questions of stylistic differentiation and the economic conditions for such difference to appear; by extending the idea of camp beyond its being a hallmark of consumption, I offer an analysis of how queer subjectivity emerges within the dynamics of capitalist cultural production for audiences that extend well beyond queer male subcultures.

Freed Productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Claims that the Freed film musicals of the post-World War II period can be set apart from contemporaneous musicals of the period cannot derive solely from perceived formal qualities of their mise-en-scene and choreography, and the forms of distinction that we might draw around their anomalous production cannot necessarily be adduced through other kinds of labor history. Striking as these aspects of the films may be, it is imperative to consider the industrial conditions under which these forms of spectacle could arrive at the large screen. When we recall that Metro was enduring numerous challenges in order to remain competitive with other studios, we need to account for the Freed unit's almost singular eventual success as the unit on the MGM lot that earned box office profits.

Important to consider is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's unwillingness to reorganize itself in light of its competitors, an unwillingness that positioned the studio after World War II as burdened with high overhead costs, convoluted bureaucratic practices, and fewer exhibition outlets. Tom Schatz describes Metro's organization as "the consummate example of waste and excess," and he amply demonstrates the studio's numerous unhelpful maneuvers to respond to a changing economic climate for the Hollywood studios. Unlike its competitors, Metro did not move in the direction of making fewer and frequently more tightly budgeted films that represented potentially smaller losses if a product failed and greater gains if it garnered healthy receipts. Rather, the abortive attempts to sustain...